Efficient distributed algorithm for correctly finding disjoint paths in wireless sensor networks

Routing messages through multiple (node) disjoint paths connecting two sensor nodes is a promising way to increase robustness, throughput and load balance of sensor networks. This paper proposes a distributed algorithm to find k disjoint paths connecting two given nodes s and t. A set of paths connecting s and t are disjoint if any two of them do not have any common nodes besides s and t. Unlike the existing distributed algorithms, the proposed algorithm can guarantee answer correctness, i.e. it will output k disjoint paths if there exist k disjoint paths in the network or the maximum number of disjoint paths otherwise. Compared to the centralised algorithms which can also guarantee answer correctness, this algorithm is shown to have much lower communication cost, which is confirmed by experimental results. To the best of our knowledge, this algorithm is the first distributed algorithm which can guarantee answer correctness.